Coinbase NFT Marketplace Stalls Opening Week, But How Much Does It Matter?

The much-anticipated Coinbase NFT marketplace, which is officially live now in its beta iteration, saw less than 900 transactions from around 650 users, totaling about 74 ETH or $217,000 in sales in its first week.

Coinbase competitor OpenSea saw nearly 500,000 transactions from over 160,000 users, totaling nearly $700 million in sales over the last seven days, for comparison purposes. 

But after a disappointing launch, Coinbase NFT saw a relatively massive volume spike on Thursday with more than $100,000 in total volume traded on 150 transactions, or about one-third of what the marketplace did in its first eight days.

Coinbase NFT is still in beta and only a small percentage of the platform’s 3 million waitlisted participants have access to buy, sell, and trade. Since launch, it has added about 100 new users per day.

OpenSea, in contrast, has been around since 2017 and has dominated the space’s NFT marketplace share (LooksRare being its biggest competitor) with over 1 million users over the last five years. 

But does it make sense to compare Coinbase and OpenSea at this stage? No, probably not.

When it comes to choosing an NFT marketplace, users are most likely to buy and sell wherever the lowest prices and highest liquidity or marketplace volume is. Coinbase NFT simply cannot compete with OpenSea while in beta.

The users buying and selling on Coinbase NFT right now are likely testing the platform rather than actively trading NFTs. 

Coinbase NFT is slowly entering the battle for NFT marketplace supremacy. And it is looking to differentiate itself by building a web3 social media trading platform. Users can like, comment, and chat about NFTs, listings, and sales.

It also has the unique ability to offer platform-custodied NFTs, held by Coinbase itself, for those who are not intimately familiar with the web3 landscape and don’t want to risk getting hacked or scammed, as well as self-custodied NFTs. 

And finally, Coinbase NFT is powered by 0x Labs, a multi-chain exchange infrastructure build for web3. 0x claims to offer multi-chain NFT swap support, the most robust feature set of any NFT exchange protocol, and 54 percent more gas efficient transactions.

"We're thrilled that Coinbase is using 0x to power their new social marketplace for NFTs and anticipate this launch will unlock a massive wave of new users into the blockchain space," Will Warren, the project's co-founder and CEO, said. "We look forward to seeing many more apps and marketplaces take advantage of 0x Protocol's robust NFT swap feature set and industry-leading gas efficiency in the coming future."

OpenSea is undoubtedly in first place in this race with a big five-year head start, but the next 10 years are a marathon and not a sprint. With less than 2 million total users on OpenSea, there is room for massive growth in the NFT space.

In 2021, over 300 million people, or 3.9 percent of the world, owned cryptocurrencies in some capacity, according to TripleA. Only 3.9 percent of the world is participating in the cryptocurrency space, and less than 1 percent of the people who own or have owned crypto are using OpenSea.

It’ll be interesting to see how many newcomers Coinbase NFT brings to web3, and how increased innovation and competition impact the entire space.